Of Interest: This is one of the earliest images of Mercury returned by the MESSENGER spacecraft.

It was taken in January 2008, when MESSENGER was about to embark upon a seven-year period of exploration and discovery of the innermost planet that would feature three flybys and four years of orbital operations. When this image was taken, our knowledge of Mercury came almost entirely from the flybys of the Mariner 10 spacecraft in the 1970s.